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There are few spectacles more cringe-making than that of a bunch of sportswriters suddenly getting religion.

This week, the ballots are being distributed for the Baseball Hall of Fame's class of 2007. Always, that process is couched in the kind of high reverence usually reserved for picking a new pope, but this year, the sanctimony has been laid on especially thick.

Viewed in pure baseball terms, and against historical precedent, the candidacy of Mark McGwire would hardly stir debate. No player with anything close to his home run totals — 583, placing him seventh on the career list — has ever been excluded from Cooperstown. It's fine and dandy to pick away at the rest of his game, but it's a huge stretch to suggest that on that basis he simply doesn't belong.

There is, of course, the unique baseball practice of making a guy wait — you don't pick him the first time around, but some time in the future, after a sufficient period of reflection, he somehow morphs into a Hall of Famer. Not sure how or why that happens, but among some writers it is a time-honoured tradition, a way of suggesting the difference between a sure thing and a marginal inductee, though of course they both wind up in the same place in the end.

But with McGwire, if an Associated Press poll of a significant slice of the voters is correct, this isn't a quibble over fine points.

He isn't getting in now, his first year of eligibility, and he might not get in ever, because of what are perceived as issues of character.

Now, let's roll back the clock to 1998, the year the McGwire-Sammy Sosa home-run derby saved baseball, united America, made small children believe in heroes again, made the world safe for mom and apple pie.

Exactly the same scribes who were writing that drivel then, who were desperately trying to cast a warm, fuzzy glow over a sport nearly destroyed by labour wars, are the ones standing in moral judgment over McGwire now.

Many of them similarly stood in moral judgment over one of their confreres, Steve Wilstein of the AP, who in the midst of that feel-good, nostalgic love-in, had the temerity to report that he had spotted a vial of androstenedione in McGwire's locker.

How dare a reporter violate a player's privacy? Didn't he understand that andro was merely a supplement, and an all-natural one at that? Why spoil the party? Why wreck a perfectly good fairy tale?

This coming 10 years after the Ben Johnson scandal ought to have made everyone in the sports business a little bit smarter, a little less naive, a little more aware of the miracles of doping.

Not that Major League Baseball cared. There was no testing, there was no ban, and there was a whole lot of looking the other way as players were transformed into comic book musclemen. The commissioner and the owners were absolutely complicit in McGwire's transgressions. No one would have even suggested to him that he was doing anything wrong.

Now, long after the fact, after McGwire's cowardly performance in front of a U.S. congressional kangaroo court — "I'm not here to talk about the past", is the line that will live in infamy — comes the outrage, the disappointment, the drawing of lines in the sand.

Just a little late, don't you think?

The Hall of Fame is a place reserved for very good baseball players, not necessarily the same thing as very good human beings. Pete Rose is excluded because he violated a rule that is written on every clubhouse wall. McGwire did no such thing. There was no rule. And all the while he was encouraged, lauded, made wealthy — and exploited to make everyone associated with the game more wealthy as well.

McGwire ought to be in Cooperstown, where his plaque can serve as a permanent reminder of the hypocrisy of the times.

Shame on him. Shame on baseball. Shame on the commissioner. Shame on the press. Shame on those who perpetuated the myth and prospered.

But there's no rewriting history.